The U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) is a federal agency responsible for national transportation policy. The DOT, established in 1966, oversees numerous federal regulatory programs ranging from intermodal transportation to the St. Lawrence Seaway.
The U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) is the principle federal agency managing public land RESOURCES in the United States. Created in 1849, the DOI manages almost half a billion acres of federal property.
The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) is a cabinet-level agency in the federal government created in 1913 with a mission “to foster, promote, and develop the welfare of the wage earners of the United States, to improve their working conditions, and to advance their opportunities for profitable employment.”
Demographics are population measures such as age, race, gender, occupation, and INCOME. Demographics are often used by businesspeople to define market segments on which to focus their efforts.
Deming’s 14 points comprise a philosophy about business and efforts to achieve quality devised by Dr. W. Edward Deming (1900–1993), a mathematical physicist. In 1950 Deming was invited to Japan to teach.
Demand, or the law of demand, is the relationship between price and quantity demanded for a good or service in a market. The law of demand states there is an inverse relationship between price and quantity demanded; that is, the higher the price the lower the quantity demanded, and the lower the price, the higher the quantity demanded.
The Delphi technique—named after the Oracle of Delphi, to whom ancient Greeks would travel to seek advice about the future—is a marketing-management tool used by businesses for forecasting.
Deflation is a sustained decrease in the general level of prices in an economy. It is the opposite of INFLATION, an increase in the general level of prices. Falling prices are a result from either increasing productivity, which allows producers to increase output and INCOME; or declining DEMAND.
A decision tree is a map of the reasoning process businesspeople use to make choices. Decision trees are excellent tools for making financial or number-based decisions where a lot of detailed data needs to be considered.
Also known as deceptive acts, deceptive practices, and deceptive sales practices, deceptive trade practices are methods of doing business that are likely to mislead individual consumers or other businesses, usually through the use of deceitful, false, incomplete, or otherwise misleading statements.
The accounting terms debit and credit mean “left” and “right,” respectively. Abbreviated dr. (from the Latin debere) and cr. (from the Latin credere), debits and credits are integral parts of financial or double-entry accounting.
The Davis-Bacon Act, signed by President Herbert Hoover in 1931, requires contractors working for the federal government to pay the “prevailing” local wage. Expanded to include projects receiving federal funding or loan guarantees, the act effectively requires contractors to pay UNION scale wages.
Database management is the process of organizing and manipulating a database. A database is a collection of organized data that is alterable (create, update, and delete), accessible, has a purpose, minimizes/eliminates redundancy, imports and exports data, has data independence, and has data integrity.
Damages, for legal purposes, are compensatory or punitive monetary awards. Persons suffering loss or injury (for example, in a car accident) sue in court to recover damages to which they are entitled by law.
Cycle time—the minimum amount of time necessary for a task or series of tasks to be completed—is usually associated with manufacturing systems and depends on whether tasks are accomplished in a series or as parallel units. For example, in a textile factory production of a shirt requires cutting, sewing, and packaging.
Cyberspace is the electronic network of communications that includes the INTERNET and the WORLD WIDE WEB. Cyberspace is growing rapidly and creating a variety of new issues and concerns for global businesses.
A customs union is an agreement between or among countries to reduce or eliminate TRADE BARRIERS among its members and have a common set of external TARIFFs for trade outside the union. A customs union is one step beyond a FREE TRADE agreement but below a common market.
Customer-relationship management (CRM) is an organization’s efforts to build and maintain relationships with the people who buy their products and services. CRM became a popular buzzword among marketers in the last decade as new technology improved the ability of firms to gather information about and communicate with their customers using a variety of methods.
Customer loyalty (or customer retention) is the degree to which a company keeps its existing customers. Customer loyalty can be measured through repeat business and customer referrals. In most marketing environments, it is significantly more expensive to find and acquire a new customer than it is to retain an existing customer.
Cultural industries are those industries considered critical to maintaining the cultural heritage of a region or country. Most often the term refer to the exclusion of certain industries from FREE TRADE agreements. (Citizens and politicians in many countries fear U.S. cultural dominance.) In addition to challenging existing cultural norms, cultural industries are a significant source of revenue.
